Introduction

Summary

SDI was probably the most important new military programme of the 1980s. When it was announced, it was certainly one of the most controversial and unexpected. Eight years and $22 billion later, after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Gulf War, SDI was refocussed into a new scheme which attracted renewed, bipartisan support: a Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS). The Pentagon is still pushing for increases in its SDI/GPALS budget and preparing advanced experiments which would contravene the ABM Treaty. It hopes to start full-scale development of interceptors and command and control elements in 1993 or 1994. The debate about strategic defence is sure to rage on long after. This book analyses the history of SDI, combining multiple perspectives to show how and why it has developed.

SDI was exceptional from the day it was announced. Never before had an American president offered a ‘Vision’ of using advanced technology to make nuclear weapons ‘impotent and obsolete’. Welcomed by the ‘New Right’ and decried by the arms control community, the plan to develop space weapons took centre stage in the superpower summits of the 1980s. The research promised, or threatened, to generate qualitative advances in other, offensive weapons: notably battlefield lasers, anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), space weapons and Command Control Communication (C³). And so SDI became a key growth market.

Works on SDI could fill a library.